Cloning root environment with Anaconda

Question

Going through one of (very few available) tutorials on Anaconda, I tried:

$ conda create -n rootclone --clone root

This failed:

src_prefix: '/home/bir/conda'
dst_prefix: '/home/bir/conda/envs/rootclone'
Packages: 49
Files: 471
An unexpected error has occurred, please consider sending the
following traceback to the conda GitHub issue tracker at:

    https://github.com/conda/conda/issues

Include the output of the command 'conda info' in your report.


Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/bir/conda/bin/conda", line 5, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
  File "/home/bir/conda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/conda/cli/main.py", line 203, in main
    args_func(args, p)
  File "/home/bir/conda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/conda/cli/main.py", line 208, in args_func
    args.func(args, p)
  File "/home/bir/conda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/conda/cli/common.py", line 609, in inner
    return func(args, parser)
  File "/home/bir/conda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/conda/cli/main_create.py", line 50, in execute
    install.install(args, parser, 'create')
  File "/home/bir/conda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/conda/cli/install.py", line 170, in install
    clone(args.clone, prefix, json=args.json, quiet=args.quiet)
  File "/home/bir/conda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/conda/cli/install.py", line 91, in clone
    quiet=quiet)
  File "/home/bir/conda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/conda/misc.py", line 177, in clone_env
    data = s.encode('utf-8')
MemoryError

And badly. The environment is created:

$ conda info -e
# conda environments:
#
oracle                   /home/bir/conda/envs/oracle
oracleclone              /home/bir/conda/envs/oracleclone
rootclone                /home/bir/conda/envs/rootclone
root                  *  /home/bir/conda

But it's not working at all:

$ . activate rootclone
discarding /home/bir/conda/bin from PATH
prepending /home/bir/conda/envs/rootclone/bin to PATH
(rootclone)bir@N2C:~/python$ which python
/usr/bin/python   # Should be in /home/bir/conda/envs/rootclone/bin

But is this a true bug, or is conda create -n --clone just not designed for cloning the conda root environment?

Answer 1

Use following command to clone default root environment of Anaconda, the root environment is named as base. This worked for me with Anaconda3-5.0.1

conda create --name <env_name> --clone base

Answer 2

The MemoryError indicates that the conda process ran out of memory. Perhaps you need to allocate more swap memory.